NDT2’s Triple Bill at Sadler’s Wells

NDT2, Triple Bill, Sadler’s Wells, February 16, 2022

There is an art to presenting triple bills that can all too easily be taken for granted; anyone can put on three ballets in a program but if the triple character of the works doesn’t create a spectator experience of the whole, then the image of the company is affected. I was a little apprehensive about attending NDT2’s recent triple bill at Sadler’s Wells (in collaboration with Dance Consortium) in view of the legacy of the Sol León and Paul Lightfoot years; their existential, highly produced choreography seemed to turn inwards on itself, while younger choreographers from the same stable were influenced to the point of in-house plagiarism. However, Nederlands Dans Theater is under new management. Emily Molnar has been artistic director since August 2020, taking up her position in the middle of the lockdown era. A tough time to begin, but politicians in the Netherlands had a different understanding of the value of the arts than politicians in this country: dancers were considered essential workers, so Molnar was able to continue working with her dancers in the studio. Since performances and touring were cancelled, it became a time for exploration and experimentation at home, allowing for a singular unity and maturity to develop within the company. “This is not the season we planned for but it will be the season that defines us in new and unique ways,” says Molnar in an interview with Annette Embrechts. Seeing the current program of NDT2 is reminiscent of the triple bills in the mid-1970s — a heady spirit of freedom and creativity in miniature form that defines the artistic integrity of the company. 

In the first work, NDT’s resident choreographer Marco Goecke’s The Big Crying, the maturity of the youthful dancers meets the maturity of the choreographer. In reflecting on the death of his father, Goecke’s tightly wrought choreography is suffused with imagery of pain and suffering that, through the bodies of the dancers, is transformed into visual richness. In the intricacy of movement and facial grimaces images of Duchenne de Boulogne’snineteenth century physiological experiments on the expression of emotions vie with the sensation of violence that Francis Bacon poured into his framed settings. In contrast to Goecke’s powerful physical imagery the voice of Tori Amos — particularly in the R.E.M. song, Losing My Religion — pulls the words apart to reveal their fragility. It’s a beautiful partnering of motion and emotion in which the balance between the two is in constant tension. 

Hans Van Manen’s Simple Things begins and ends, as its title suggests, in the interplay between dance and music; one can sense Van Manen’s enjoyment in working with the four dancing bodies in 2001 to sculpt the space around them in relation to the upbeat rhythms of Alan Bern’s Scarlatti Fever and the Allegretto from Joseph Haydn’s piano trio No. 28 in E-Major. Although there are only four dancers, Van Manen fills the space of the stage with his flowing invention and wit. The quality and precision of the dancers — Barry Gans, Demi Bawon, Ivo Mateus and Sophie Whittome — embody the youthful elan and exuberance of the choreography that, for all its brevity, continues to resonate long after the curtain falls. 

Johan Inger’s IMPASSE begins with his own visually arresting set of a wooden shack lit by Tom Visser with a video outline by Annie Tådne that suggests a childlike dream in which Sophie Whittome is the child who dreams. She has the qualities of innocence, impulsiveness and questioning but with the arrival of an ebullient, extravagantly costumed crowd she adjusts to what Inger describes as ‘a seduction of unending streams of ‘newness’’. Unlike the previous works, the opening scene sets up a narrative intent that is then swallowed up in the visual settings, the costumes (by Bregje van Balen) and the riotous dancing to the groove of Ibrahim Maalouf’s jazz rhythms. It’s as if Inger has found valid questions to address without the dramaturgical means to embody them: ‘How do we bridge the gap that grows as we stagnate…Can we nurture the ability to seriously interrogate the world together, and find the capacity to reimagine it?’ Even if this quote from the program note is a post-rationalization of the work, it’s a question the choreography and the dramaturgical structure of IMPASSE struggle to engage with.

What is unquestionable, however, is that the quality of performance in all three works and the production values that are integral to them reveal the youthful ebullience and imagination of NDT2 and the enduring value of a well-designed triple bill. 

Nederlands Dans Theater 1 at Sadler’s Wells

Nederlands Dans Theatre 1, León & Lightfoot, Pite and Goecke, Sadler’s Wells, June 26

Jon Bond, Roger Van der Poel, Aram Hasler and Rena Narumi in The Statement (photo: Foteini Christofilopoulu)

The first work on Nederlands Dans Theatre 1’s season at Sadler’s Wells plays uncomfortably between entertainment and oppression. It’s as if house choreographers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot have abruptly interrupted the five dancers — Myrthe van Opstal, Chloé Albaret, Marne van Opstal, Roger Van der Poel and Jorge Nazal — in Shoot The Moon and leave us to observe the intensity of their unstable relationships on a revolving set of three rooms from which the only exit is through a door or window into the next one. The program note suggests each room contains its own love story, but the febrile gestural vocabulary, clinical partnering and the open mouths of despair suggest each individual is going through hell and has no psychological space for anyone else, while the pervasive trope of effortless high extensions suggest a compulsive narcissism. It is as if Ibsen’s dramas of domestic claustrophobia have met Virginia Woolf’s fragmented narratives without the nuanced psychology of the former and the acute formal tension of the latter. One might almost conclude that set, costumes and live, voyeuristic video of the dancers projected on the clerestory-level screen are all part of a hermetically sealed aesthetic of neurosis. León and Lightfoot choose Philip Glass’s Movement II from his Tirol Concerto for piano and orchestra to lend the work emotions that are absent from the choreography; it is not music on which the dancers rely for their musicality but rather a score to appease the audience.

If the elements of Shoot the Moon were limited to conjuring up the images it portrays it would make an interesting study in the power of the unconscious to affect a choreographic outcome, but seeing the company’s assistant choreographer Marco Goecke’s Woke up Blind suggests an NDT 1 house aesthetic. Again the subject is love, as expressed in two songs Jeff Buckley recorded, his own You and I and Van Morrison’s The Way Young Lovers Do. The first person we see from a cast of seven is Nozal who hasn’t yet recovered from the tension of Shoot the Moon, but Buckley’s voice is also in a register of despair. At least Goecke is trying to match the fevered pitch of his choreography to Buckley’s overwrought state of delivery, but given its gestural similarity to Shoot the Moon and its translation onto technically precise dancing bodies, the effect barely shifts NDT 1’s tormented aesthetic.

It only takes a pause to rectify this. In The Statement, Crystal Pite uses four dancers — Aram Hasler, Rena Narumi, Jon Bond and Roger Van der Poel — to recreate a boardroom scene in an international investment office that has just fomented an international conflict in order to profit financially. On an otherwise dark stage, Jay Gower Taylor places a long, shiny oval table that Tom Visser lights from a similarly dimensioned hood above it; the concentration of light on the figures assembled around the perimeter dressed neatly and expensively by Pite and Joke Visser is intense. Their preoccupation is how to make a statement that exonerates their superiors without taking the blame themselves. Using a recorded one-act play by Jonathon Young with the voices of Young, Meg Roe, Colleen Wheeler and Andrew Wheeler, Pite choreographs to the accents and inflections of its tightly woven and increasingly confrontational argument. In extending choreography into mime and mime into choreography, Pite puts the polished virtuosity of the dancers at the service of gesture; nothing is gratuitous. In its message and expressive power, The Statement can be seen as a contemporary successor to Kurt Joos’s The Green Table.

It’s hard to return to the house style of León and Lightfoot in the final work, Stop-Motion, where love is replaced by ‘a process of farewell and transformation’, the revolving rooms by an empty space and Philip Glass by a mournful Max Richter. The set by León and Lightfoot with its chalk dust is visually arresting under Tom Bevoort’s lighting and its effect is evocative of the ephemeral nature of life. The large-scale, close-up video work, directed by Rahi Rezvani, conceived by León and Lightfoot and featuring their daughter Saura, is reminiscent of choreographer Édouard Lock’s interest in and integration of film and performance for La La La Human Steps. However the visual gratification of Stop-Motion is no substitute for psychological insight and emotional strength and while the choreographic use of space has changed from Shoot the Moon, the vocabulary remains within a narrow band of imagination that fails to release the full potential of these dancers beyond their shapes and extensions.

Sadler’s Wells Sampled

Sadler’s Sampled, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, February 3

Victoria Fox and Welly O’Brien in Caroline Bowditch’s Dedicated to…(photo: Brian Hartley)

As Alistair Spalding writes in his welcome note to Sampled, the evening offers audiences ‘the opportunity to experience a range of world-class artists and dance styles in one evening, at a reduced price’. There is also an educational element in the filmed interviews with artists or directors before each work on stage that help to bridge the gap between dance and audience. The nine works on display are eclectic so there is something for everyone, from Mikhail Fokine’s Dying Swan through Jesús Carmona’s flamenco Soléa Del Campanillo to Yeah Yellow’s b-boy Sunshine. It’s a performative smorgasbord, but unlike a restaurant menu it is impossible to pick and choose what you want to see. This may be partly what Sampled hopes to achieve — the possibility that an unfamiliar taste might develop into a new craving — but such a rich menu of performances is not the kind of dance programming that favours the taster who is after a gastronomic experience. It doesn’t take long to realise the programming idea is less a format designed to inspire young dancers and encourage new audiences than a marketing ploy to promote the upcoming season, a point at which public relations acumen clashes with the art form itself.

In a bid to market the season, Sampled is crammed so full of a season’s worth of extracts that it cannot add up to a coherent program and at two and a half hours it risks choreographic overload. With its staged works, free front-of-house films, VR offerings and workshops, Sampled is a cross between a festival and a convention; what it achieves, however, is getting people through the doors into the foyers and auditorium — the place is packed and what a wonderful idea to make part of the stalls a promenade area — but the success of Sampled will be measured in quantitative rather than qualitative metrics, as in how many of these newcomers will become new audience members at Sadler’s Wells.

There are interviews in the printed program with some of the performers in which one of the standard questions is about their first experience of dance. Inevitably they respond that it was a single evening’s work that inspired them to dance. It makes the case for underwriting opportunities for younger children to see the truly world-class repertoire Sadler’s Wells puts on throughout the year rather than making Sampled their point of entry. The tired little ballerina in front of me who had to wait almost two hours to see the four minutes of Zenaida Yanowsky’s The Dying Swan might have been hoping for a more propitious path to inspiration.

The majority of works in Sampled are extracts, and some that look like extracts are just very short works, like The Dying Swan and works by BBC Young Dancers Nafisah Baba, Jodelle Douglas and Harry Barnes. Marco Goecke’s Wir sagen uns Dunkels for Nederlands Dans Theater 2 is a full work, though it could have been easily — and advantageously — reduced for Sampled to one of its four movements. When Baba rises joyously into the air in her solo, Inescapable, it is the first time in 30 minutes that dance’s vertical dimension has been explored and Carmona reminds us soon afterwards, on top of his virtuosity, how many choreographic dimensions there are to be explored. Alexander Whitley’s Kin, a duet for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Jenna Roberts and Mathias Dingman, suffers the fate of many extracts in that however beautifully constructed and danced, it has an air of being lost, while Humanhood’s photograph in the program is far more enigmatic than the extract of their production, ZERO, which seems drowned in production values. The extract from Caroline Bowditch’s Dedicated to… for Candoco is, despite its orphaned state, still a little jewel beautifully danced by Welly O’Brien and Victoria Fox (and co-director Ben Wright’s witty, avuncular introduction augurs well for the company), while Yeah Yellow’s Sunshine is rich and loud in b-boy virtuosity. Whitley features again in a pre-performance showing in the Pina Bausch room of Celestial Bodies, a VR film of an extract from his 8 Minutes, a collaboration between the Guardian’s VR team and Whitley’s company. Just outside the room, on the film wall, are two screens, one showing the National Youth Dance Company (run by Sadler’s Wells) in sequences from Damien Jalet’s Tarataseismic on location in Hull, and the other showing two young b-girls, the sisters Eddie and Terra talking and dancing on Terra’s 8th birthday. Directed by Ben Williams for BCTV (Breakin’ Convention’s professional development course for film makers), the film has unsurprisingly won multiple awards. Now that’s an inspiration worth sampling.